About

Collinwood Road is not the kind of place where you’ll find people quoting proof texts at you, or saying ‘the Bible says’ when what they really mean is ‘I think’. Our roots are in the liberal tradition that knows that the Bible was not handed down on a platter from God, but is the result of hundreds of years of God’s people struggling to make sense of their lives and to hear what God has to say to them.

We are in no danger of sliding into fundamentalism, or even adopting a lazy approach of believing that the message of the Bible must be something easy and simple to hear. We know that sometimes it takes work to make sense of what the Bible authors are trying to say to us, and sometimes we have to listen carefully to put ourselves in their situation and understand what those words meant two or three thousand years ago, in a different place and a different time.

But if we know that the Bible speaks with varied voices and sometimes from a context which we find difficult to understand, we also believe that it speaks to us with authority, that it is the record of the experience of God’s people living with, arguing with, being puzzled by, being amazed by, that always surprising and always graceful God. We believe that through these words God is speaking to us.